After an initial startup pulse, I had to put the EWHADP on hold when I started teaching at Grand Valley (Fall of 2014). Emily Gilhooly, one of my undergraduate students at Grand Valley, worked on the project during the winter of 2015 and began the long process of updating the database by checking and re-coding every single entry. As I prepared to make the move to the University of South Carolina in the spring of 2015, I started a GoFundMe campaign to raise some cash to pay a research assistant to work on the project. Thanks to the generosity of several donors, that campaign was successful. With the hiring of USC graduate student Laura Clifford, the project was up and running again in the fall of 2015. While Laura made a lot of headway tracking down references and moving the database forward, however, she soon found a better long-term employment situation. So I hit the pause button again on the EWHADP.

The project stayed paused as I moved from the SCIAA building into my new lab space, worked my way through my first two years of teaching at South Carolina, and initiated some excavation fieldwork at a site on the Broad River. After that field school, I hired one of my students (Sam McDorman) to do the bulk of the basic laboratory processing of the materials we recovered. With the artifacts from 38FA608 washed and cataloged, I can start analysis. And I can move Sam on to another project: the EWHADP.

Of the $3400 in donated EWHADP funds that I came with, there was about $2870 left at the beginning of the semester. That money should be sufficient to get through at least 2.5 of the three goals I have:

1) assemble primary references for all information in the database;2) check and re-code existing information in the database, supplying missing information and adding greater detail;3) add new information to the database.

I don't expect to get through these goals quickly, but the wheels are now in motion again. The EWHADP is staffed, funded, and exists in a dedicated office space with room for files, books, piles of stuff, a scanner, and a computer. When the second goal is completed, you'll get an updated database that should be an order of magnitude better than the one that exists now. And then you'll start getting updates to the website as we begin adding in new information.

I'd like to again thank those that donated to this project and haven't questioned why it has periodically slowed down over the years: anyone who juggles knows that it's difficult to keep everything up in the air at all times. Your patience is appreciated. Thank you. And stay tuned.

Figure 4 from Jeffery Kruchten's (2012) report on excavations at the Knoebel site (see text for link).

I'm in the process of getting back to paying more attention to the EWHADP. Unfortunately, the research assistant that I hired last semester was not able to continue for very long (she got a better offer . . . oh well), and I was too busy trying to get myself up and running on number of other fronts to be able to devote any time to this project. I still have money left to pay someone to help with the database, but I think my better strategy now might be to just start to chip away it myself. There is plenty of work to be done before the database is updated to the point where I'm ready for another release, so don't hold your breath. But the project is not dead.

The first new thing I'm adding is information about a pair of Mississippian wall trench structures from the Knoebel site in Saint Clair County, Illinois. I stumbled across this 2012 paper by Jeffery Kruchten while I was seeing if I could find a copy of Charles Bareis' (1976) report online. No dice on the Bareis report, but Kruchten discusses two structures excavated in 2005-2006. In Kruchten's paper, the structures are designated Features 1 and 2, repeating feature designations that were used in the Bareis report. To avoid confusion in the EWHADP database, I have designated them "Feature 1 (2005)" and "Feature 2 (2005)." They will be Structures 2263 and 2264 when the new database comes out.

I hope to be able to announce the latest iteration of the database soon. The last database release (containing information on over 2100 structures) was all the way back in March of 2014. Gah!

​The project got off to a quick start in February of 2014, but stalled when I had to direct my energies elsewhere later that year. I spent the 2014-2015 academic year teaching a 4-4 at Grand Valley State University, and it was difficult to find time to do anything with the EWHADP other than teach look at the box of files and participate in a trial linking of the EWHADP database with DINAA. GVSU undergraduate Emily Gilhooly did make some progress on the database, continuing the process of consulting the original records in order to re-code some fields and add new data to others.

With donated cash in hand from a successful GoFundMe campaign, I was able to hire University of South Carolina doctoral student Laura Clifford to work on the project this semester. Laura's first job is to finish the checking and re-coding of all the records currently in the database. She's working on that now. When that task is complete, we'll make the new database available and she'll move on to the next job: adding new records. That will involve tracking down leads from publications we've already seen as well as finding new sources of data in print publications and online. Eventually I hope to give Laura the the keys to this website so that she can write the "What's New" blurbs as she adds new structures, update the maps, and keep the online bibliography up to date.

I would like to keep this project going next semester, but I'm not going to ask for more money until I have some results from this semester to demonstrate success.

I would like to again thank those made a cash contribution to help get the EWHADP out of mothballs and running again: David Cusack, Ken Kosidlo, Josh Wells, and a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. In addition to my sincere gratitude, I have (as promised) a limited edition sticker for each of you. And I owe you beers.

The GoFundMe campaign I set up to support a research assistant for the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) has ended successfully! It got three donations early on (from David Cusack, Ken Kosidlo, and Josh Wells) and then a single person (who has requested anonymity) contributed the remaining funds yesterday. That wasn't how I thought this project was going to get funded but it was a very pleasant surprise. I'm really grateful to those that took in interest in the project this time around, and I think you'll be impressed how it moves forward with someone working on it steadily. And think of how happy the lucky South Carolina graduate student I hire will be: he/she will get some good experience working with grey literature, databases, website management, and GIS, and will also be able to purchase some groceries. It's a win-win. Thank you for your support, donors!

I started the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) a little over a year ago. The goal was/is to build a website that serves to assemble and freely distribute information about prehistoric house structures in eastern North America. The current database contains information and county-level spatial data for 2130 prehistoric structures. I've started a campaign on GoFundMe to raise money to support a research assistant to work on the project for a semester. This post explains why.

As I learned when writing this paper, much of the information about prehistoric houses in eastern North America resides in the so-called "gray literature" of CRM reports, theses, dissertations, and unpublished manuscripts. I hoped that the EWHADP would function as a magnet to identify information information locked up in the gray literature and make it known and available, allowing us as an archaeological community to capitalize on the work that's already been done. What's the point of information stored in a publication that only a handful of people even know exists? I really think we can do better than that, and we can save ourselves the wasted effort of repeated searches for the same information in the same stacks of legacy materials.

I was able to put a lot of time into the project to get it going, and as it sits now the website is functioning and is visited daily by people who make use of the information there. I have no idea how much time I put into the endeavor (both to collect the original dataset and to get the website up and running), but it surely runs into the many hundreds of hours.

With the demands of my job this year and other commitments, I haven't been able to devote any serious time to the EWHADP. There was some forward progress this semester, however, thanks to the efforts of GVSU undergraduate student Emily Gilhooly. She was able to spend a couple hours per week on the database, consulting primary sources and re-coding the information (primarily reclassifying structure shape and applying a finer chronological scheme). For her trouble she got some experience that will hopefully be useful to her, and she'll be added as a contributor to the database when a new version is released. Thanks Emily!

Emily's work on the database gave me some insight into what it will take to get it fully updated. She worked perhaps 25 hours and got through about 200 records (about 8 records per hour). At that rate, it will take about 230 hours to get through the 1850 or so records that haven't been re-coded. Some records go faster than others, of course, and I'm hoping it will go faster rather than slower. A few hours difference here or there won't change the reality, however, that a significant time commitment will be required to get the database ready for the next release.

I've never done a GoFundMe campaign before, but I thought I'd give it a shot and see if it's a viable way to support something like this. I'm looking for funds to support a graduate student research assistant to bring the EWHADP database and the website up to where it should be (i.e., incorporating all the information I currently have in a clear, consistent format that is useful to others). The goal of $3400 is based on a $12/hour rate for 280 hours (20 hours per week).

I'll have some start-up funds at South Carolina that I could potentially use if this campaign falls short or doesn't work at all, but I thought this would be worth a try. Projects like the EWHADP are on the ground floor of what is going to emerge as a new architecture for using our previously-collected archaeological data to address questions with big temporal and spatial scales. The data collected by the EWHADP are, and always be, open access. If I saw someone building a similar database that would add another component - radiocarbon dates, mortuary data, copper artifacts, etc. - I would support it. I hope some of you will support the effort to continue to build this tool. If you think that it's time we start really leveraging the archaeological information that we've spent untold dollars and person-hours collecting in this part of the county, please consider contributing to this project.

In previous posts (here, here, and, most recently here), I have discussed what I see as the benefits of building a system of linking archaeological datasets together. Though I haven't been able to spend much time this academic year on building the EWHADP database, the people at DINAA have been forging ahead. I am third author on a poster that will be presented at the SAA meetings next week that will discuss the progress that's been made on using DINAA to cross-link datasets:

The poster will be at session titled "The Afterlife of Archaeological Information: Use and Reuse of Digital Archaeological Data" on Thursday, April 16, from 6:00-8:00 pm in Grand Ballroom A. I can't be there, but many of the cool kids involved with the project will be, and you should go and talk to them. Linking together independent datasets is going to be a real game changer for archaeological research in this country, and these are the people that are making that happen.

We've done a "pilot" run linking the entries in the most recent published version of the EWHADP dataset to the entries in DINAA. The electronic matching was not complete: several states remain to be included in DINAA and the attempt to link the datasets revealed some other issues that will need to be resolved (both on my end and their end). That's exactly the point of doing this sort of thing, though: someone has to go first and figure it out. I've created an entry in my Database section to provide an Excel file that contains the automatically-generated hyperlinks to site records in DINAA. The interface from the DINAA end is here (it also references data from the Paleoindian Database of the Americas).

This step of engineering the first links is important. It is moving linked data from the realm of the hypothetical to the world of the actual. There is much work ahead to really get things knit together, but what they've done so far is not insignificant. I will be able to devote some time to the EWHADP after I'm moved down to South Carolina in the Fall. Stay tuned!

It has been many months since I have done any substantive work on the EWHADP. My time and energy last semester were almost completely taken up by teaching (and all the preparation that goes with my first time handling a four-class load). And I spent most of the free time I had over break doing some work on the issue of "ancient giants," which was a lot of fun. While I'm teaching again this semester, the burden of preparation is eased significantly because of all the work I did last semester. Assuming I've calibrated my workload correctly, I'm going to have some time to get back to the database this semester.

Or, more accurately, I'm going to have time to help someone else learn how to work on the database. Emily Gilhooly, one of my students from last semester, has started going through the database to re-code the structures using a new (hopefully more useful) set of fields created to describe basic aspects of structure shape and construction. We're also coding time period in 500-year increments when possible.

I don't know how long it will take to make an initial pass through the database to make these changes. Next on the list after that is to start adding in new data. I apologize to anyone who sent me data a long time ago . . . or sent me an email that I didn't respond to yet . . . I'm hoping with Emily's help I can get this project moving forward again.

The alert observer will have noticed that activity on this site has more-or-less ground to a halt this Fall. The reasons for that are explained in this post on my other website: my teaching job this semester is taking up nearly all of my time and energy. This is as it should be. I'll be teaching again next semester, but the preparations won't be nearly as demanding. So I hope to have time to expend on the EWHADP again during the Winter. If the stars align, I'll find a promising undergraduate among my students who would like to gain some research experience helping me wrangle data for the site. That would be helpful.

I'm a co-author on a poster at the Midwest Archaeological Conference (going on right now) that discusses using the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) as a bridge to link independent datasets (including EWHADP data). Josh Wells was the lead author of the poster, which I have posted here on my academia.edu page. Other co-authors are Eric Kansa, Sarah W. Kansa, Stephen J. Yerka, David G. Anderson, Thaddeus Bissett, Kelsey Noack Meyers, and R. Carl Demuth.

As I discussed here and here, I'm a big fan of seeing what we can do to link open sources of data. It will take some doing to make it into a reality, but it will happen. And it will have a huge upside. Stay tuned!

I haven't spent much time adding new data to the database lately, but I am working on some changes. I have a backlog of "new" data to add - I will get to it as I can.The change I am most excited about is linking the EWHADP database to the DINAA (Digitial Index of North American Archaeology) project. I wrote a little bit about that here this morning. I'm also attempting to add some search functionality to the database. If you look at the Database Search page you'll see some messy, unformatted, non-functional stuff. I've never attempted to incorporate a searchable database into a webpage before, so I'm learning (and seeing if it is possible here given the limitations of weebly) the way that I learn: trial and error. My original hope was that both this website and DINAA could access and return records from a single database file (e.g., located at GitHub) containing the most recent data, but it doesn't look like that is going to work. But I haven't given up yet.I'm also going back and checking/recoding information from all the structures currently in the database. I came up with what I think are improvements in the ways I was classifying shape, summarizing architectural information, and representing temporal period. So I'm taking another look at everything and trying to get all the records on the same footing. That is taking some time.I hope to be working on adding new data again soon and putting up a newer, larger, cleaner, and more consistent version of the database.

Among many other claims to fame, the Koster site in Greene County, Illinois, is often said to have produced some of the earliest evidence for "substantial" (i.e., not temporary) domestic residential architecture in the Eastern Woodlands. The Koster site excavations were a massive undertaking, revealing thousands of years of complicated stratigraphy. While information from different aspects of the Koster excavations has appeared in dissertations, theses, monographs, papers, and books, a comprehensive report of the investigations has never been produced. Data on the residential architecture from Koster are, unfortunately, scattered and sometimes in conflict.

Brown and Vierra (1983:184) state that Horizon 8C, dating to around 7000 RCYBP, contained "house platforms partially dug into the slope of occupational surface . . . Well-preserved examples measure about 4.5 x 5.0 m. Rectangular structures are indicated by the deep post pits for the heavy wall supports. These structures are not lightly built shelters but represent a substantial investment in permanent shelter." The figure to the right shows what Brown and Vierra (1983:184) identify as a "well-preserved structure" defined by seven postholes (all of which appear to be within pit features?) and apparently extending into an unexcavated area. The dashed lines indicate the limits of the "platform" that was apparently created in the slope to better accommodate the structure. The claim for substantial houses at Koster was also made by Stuart Struever and Felicia Antonelli Holton in their popular book Koster: Americans in Search of Their Prehistoric Past (1979, Anchor Press): "Each structure as about twenty or twenty-five feet long, by about twelve or fifteen feet wide. . . . To form the framework of a house, the Horizon 8 people dug foundations about two feet deep with sloping walls, and then set large posts in these. The posts were wedged with chunks of limestone to stabilize them. Posts were set about eight to ten feet apart, and there is no evidence for smaller posts having been set between these. The Horizon 8 people also cut terraces into the slope to set their house floors on level ground" (Stuever and Holton 1979:172).

The confidence with which Brown and Vierra (1983) and Struever and Holton (1979) assert the presence, shape, and dimensions of substantial structures contrasts somewhat with interpretations in two dissertations written about the excavations. David Carlson (1979:352) wrote:"Horizon 8C is also interesting because of the presence of man-made terraces cut into the natural slope of the site. Whether these represent house floors or merely areas leveled for repeated use is not clear. The lack of more than a few post molds suggests the latter. The size of these terraces is often substantial. The exposed portion of the westernmost one is some 30 x 18 feet and contains at least four fire hearths or pits (Figure 51). The number of features in 8C is also substantially larger than any other component."

Carlson's (1979:Figure 52) map of the Horizon 8C excavations is shown to the right. His map shows several terraced areas and a scattering of posts/features. The "well-preserved" house shown by Brown and Vierra in the figure above is located along the southern boundary of the excavation area.Renata Wolynec also considered the architectural remains at Koster in her dissertation (1977). She discussed structures in both Horizon 8C and lower Horizon 6:"Each shelter area consisted of a platform apparently intentionally cut into the slope of the land which extended onto the adjoining terrace. The depth of these cuts ranged from 4 to 15 inches. The size of each shelter appeared to be similar, although exact determinations of area and dimensions are impossible because of the inability to determine exactly the boundaries of each structure. Their shape appeared to be rectangular, although again, boundaries were indeterminable" (Wolynec 1977:274-275).

Wolynec described the single definable structure from lower Horizon 6 and provided a map (shown to right). The structure (Feature 927) is the rectangular area in Area 16 that extends into the southern excavation boundary. It is described (Wolynec 1977:304) as a "possible shelter platform (given the variety of scattered remains within the platform, areas of burning represented in groups D-H may be fires used for light, heat, food preparation, or stone tool manufacture . . .)".I think it is pretty clear that the Middle and Late Archaic deposits at Koster contain evidence for some form(s) of domestic architecture. I'm not sure what to think, however, about the size and construction of "houses" there. I wonder if there are other sites with examples of permanent houses that were similarly constructed (i.e., with a relatively small number of relatively large posts)? Are there other sites where terraces were constructed to serve as house platforms? In their review of Archaic period archaeology in the Lower Illinois Basin in the Archaic Societies volume, Michael Wiant and colleagues acknowledge the existence of "some debate about the interpretation of these features" (Wiant et al. 2009:252). I hope somebody out there is up for the challenge of addressing these issues by taking a thorough, systematic look at the early domestic architecture at Koster sooner rather than later. It would be a really useful thing to do.